Back in 1997, the QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) operating system was positioned to play a vital role in the ongoing development of the Amiga platform. Georgios Panayio provides historical background about the proposed relationship between the two projects and shows how QNX's alleged breach of contract resulted in causing significant damage to the Amiga platform.

The general view of open source software is that it is free; however, as with many things in business, information technology is never that easy. Switching to open source needs to involve careful planning and consideration of the business benefits and potential downsides to such a migration. read more

Ten years ago, Sun Microsystems publicly debuted Java, software that initially helped establish the company's forward-thinking reputation and that later spread to most corners of the computer industry. James Gosling is the man behind the technology, interview here.

Fans of just about anything alternative all seem to suffer from a similar affliction: a naïve underestimation of the pains of switching. This goes for U.S. fans of the metric system, alternative fuel proponents, vegetarians, and yes, OS fanatics. Now, personally I'm all for a lot of those things I just mentioned, but as a lapsed vegetarian, I know full well how, despite the advantages of the alternative, sometimes it's hard to switch and easy to go back.

Microsoft Corp. is taking a new tact with its Windows XP Starter Edition campaign. On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled in Mexico City the newest member of its Starter Edition family: Windows XP Starter Edition in Spanish.

Novell Inc. announced Tuesday open beta availability of the latest version of its groupware program, Novell GroupWise 7. The new edition of GroupWise comes with an integrated e-mail and instant messaging interface, enhanced Outlook XP and 2003 support, and a bundled copy of SLES 9 (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) to run it on.

Richard Stallman explains why the European parliament should vote to keep software patents invalid: "Microsoft will be one of thousands of foreign software patent holders that will bring their patents over to Europe to sue the software developers and computer users there. Of the 50,000-odd putatively invalid software patents issued by the European Patent Office, around 80% do not belong to Europeans."

I have been using Open Office for about 8 months now for my word processing needs. In a nutshell I am satisfied. Last week the version 2.0 was released, I downloaded it as soon as it was made available, on first view, even though the key functionality in version 2.0 Beta remains largely intact, it promises dozens, possibly hundreds, of changes.

"We've all had this nightmare. You turn on your functioning Windows/Linux PC, and all you get is a blank screen, or a message telling you that certain files are missing, or the kernel has panicked for some obscure reason. Nothing works, and you need the data on your machine." A Linux rescue-cd is the solution.

A review of PC-BSD: "Now and then a new wind comes along in the ebb and flow of Linux distributions. OK, so I know PC-BSD is not Linux, but it's close enough. It's fair to say without going into technicalities and politics that BSD and Linux are cousins in the operating system world."

FUDCon 2, the second gathering of Fedora Users and Developers, has been held at LinuxTag, on the 24th and 25th of June in Karlsruhe, Germany. FUDCon 2 features presentations from prominent members of the Fedora Project, both from Red Hat and from the Fedora community. LinuxTag also has a nice write-up of FUDCon 2. The presentations are expected to be made available on the FUDcon pages soon.

IBM, Sony and Toshiba have jointly ported Linux to the Cell processor, the 4GHz multi-core PowerPC chip they co-developed. The Cell CPU is slated to ship in Sony's Playstation 3 next spring, but is likely to appear before that in workstations, embedded computing devices, and supercomputers. The Cell's Linux port includes a 64-bit PowerPC Linux kernel, along with a filesystem that abstracts the Cell's independent vector processing units so that the Linux kernel can make use of them. The companies hope their Cell Linux port will be merged into the next mainstream Linux kernel release, 2.6.13.

Apple has refreshed it's line of iPods today. All iPods now boast a color screen similar to the iPod Photo. Also, iTunes 4.9 has been released with support for podcasting. Mac users can use Software Update, Windows users can download it here. And the new iTunes release is riddled with references to the iTunes phone, says AppleInsider.

After downplaying the importance of the emerging Ajax programming model, Microsoft Corp. has decided to jump with booth feet into the Ajax fray. On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled "Atlas," a Web client framework that is designed to support multiple DHTML controls with JavaScript code.